ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE SHORTLIST OF THE JIMEI X ARLES
CURATORIAL AWARD FOR PHOTOGRAPHY AND MOVING IMAGE
Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and CHANEL jointly launched The Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image in October 2021 at the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, aiming to solicit excellent curatorial proposals from young Chinese curators and researchers working on photography and moving image art. This award is given to one curator/curatorial team per year, and the winning proposal will be in an exhibition, thanks to funding from the programme. The winner will also have access to a mentorship and exchange programme they hold yearly and a cash prize of RMB 100,000.
A committee of experts in photography, moving image and curation are convened for the 2022 Curatorial Award for Photoghraphy and Moving Image includes:
Cao Dan: Senior art journalist, curator, documentary film director, publisher of LEAP and The Art Newspaper China;
Gu Zheng: Curator, Critic, art director of the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, professor of Fudan University;
He Jing: Seasoned art critic, curator and young scholar;
He Yining: Photography historian, curator;
Lu Mingjun: PhD in History, curator, young researcher of the School of Philosophy in Fudan University, academic director of OCAT Shenzhen;
RongRong: Chinese contemporary photography artist, co-founder and co-director of Jimei × Arles International Photo Festival.
The 2nd Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image was launched in June 2022, and it attracted 44 curatorial proposals, among which five were selected by the jury committee following two rounds of selection:
Camera Obscura: The Apparatus of Eros and Image
Curatorial Team: Huang Yuting & Xu Zhibo
Born in 1996, Huang Yuting received her Bachelor's degree in Art History and Philosophy from Peking University in 2018 and her Research Master's degree in Art and Culture from Leiden University in 2020. She has participated in editing the Annual of Contemporary Art of China and curated its exhibition for years. Huang and her group members' proposal was shortlisted for the 2021 OCAT "Research-based Curatorial Project". She is currently the director of the photographic archive of the China Modern Art Archive (CMAA), Peking University.
Xu Zhibo was born in 1997. He is currently a graduate student at the School of Architecture, Central Academy of Fine Arts. His group's proposal was shortlisted for the 2021 OCAT "Research-based Curatorial Project". His research interest focuses on everyday life issues in the field of architecture and the theoretical production of architectural drawings.
Differential Valley
Curatorial Team: Chen Junyao & Wang Buyun
Junyao Chen is an independent curator based on a background in digital media. He graduated from the Department of Digital Media, Beijing Normal University, Beijing in 2018, and received a master's degree in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London in 2020. His current curatorial practice and research focus on spatial politics in the context of urbanisation, the publicity of digital media, and the digital human landscape in the public environment.
Wang Buyun was born in 2001 in Jinan, Shandong. A 2019 undergraduate student majoring in art history at Hubei Academy of Fine Arts, his research direction focuses on the individual life and the reconstruction of landscape in the marginal areas under the modernization process and follows his family to have practice in modern agriculture and field life.
The New Survivors
Curator: Wang Shuman
Shuman Wang (b. 1993, Nanjing, China), holds a master’s degree in art curating from the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Sydney, and currently lives and works in Shanghai. After joining OCAT Shanghai in 2017, she has served as the supervisor of the exhibition department since 2018. Wang has years of experience in organizing and coordinating exhibitions at OCAT Shanghai, which include Frontier: Refocusing on the Medium: “The Rise of East Asia Video Art” (2020), “I Hear Your Dreams: Contemporary Art from Norway” (2019), “Re-assessment of Post-Globalisational Politics” (2017).
More recently, she turns her attention to the emerging media art practices, and curated OCAT x KADIST Emerging Media Artist Exhibition | “In Solidarity with____” & “UN/ CONVENTIOANL”(2022/20), “Payne Zhu: Match Pool”(2022), “Liao Fei: Is everything a contingent occurrence?” (2021), “Luka Yuanyuan Yang: Shanghai Low”(2020). In addition, she is a bilingual editor (Chinese-English) in OCAT Shanghai’s research team, responsible for the E-journal Amplifier, publications, and exhibition catalogs.
Wang is also a curator and writer working in the field of media art. Her recent research interests revolve around the tension between the self and the multiplicity of power, and the proxy rules run during the exercise of power. She was the finalist in the Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech 2022. Her writing about contemporary art appears regularly in publications including Artforum, Art-Ba-Ba, ARTDBL, etc.
One Take
Curator: Hou Yuyao
Hou Yuyao received her BA Honors degree in Fine Art from Cheslea College of Art and Design and her Master’s degree in Art Business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Hou's works and projects have been included in numerous group exhibitions in London and Los Angeles and she has been commissioned by the London office of HITACCHI Japan. Hou's curatorial and operated projects has cooperated with Saatchi Gallery, London; V&A Museum, London; Zaha Hadid Design Gallery, London; Today Art Museum, Beijing, and Yingmu Art Museum, Shijiazhuang. Since 2019, Hou founded The MPI Media and has curated over 20 online exhibitions and has interviewed and published nearly 200 interview articles and videos with young artists.
Neverlands and the End of World
Curatorial Team: Tangent Collective
Established in 2021, Tangent Collective is a nomadic artist collective maneuvering in Shanghai, New York City and Toronto. The team incubates cross-disciplinary dialogues and counter-narratives in contemporary art.
The finalists’ proposals will be presented through a group exhibition during the 2022 Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival( 25th November 2022 to 3rd Janurary, 2023). The 2nd recipient will be selected during the opening week of the festival.
The award aims to support young creative forces in photography and moving image art: to discover and nurture outstanding young Chinese curators and researchers. As Lu Mingjun, curator, academic director of OCAT Shenzhen. and jury member of the Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image, said, “Through this selection, we are delighted to see that more and more young people love and engage in curation. Thanks to the curatorial education and training they have received at home and abroad, most of them have a broad theoretical and ideological vision, along with practical experience and capability. They focus on exploring the language of photography and video and keenly capture and discuss the most pressing contemporary cultural and political issues from different perspectives. Their practice not only expands the field of photography but also constantly defines contemporary photography.”
As the planner and organiser of exhibitions, as well as the researcher and opinion leader in the field of art, the "curator" plays an essential role in the research on the possibility, complexity, and uniqueness of photography and moving image art, as well as its bearings on the concept, culture, and artistic imagination. With an open and inclusive attitude, the Jimei x Arles Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image will continue to encourage more young curators to participate in the sorting and research of photography and moving image art and strive to gain more exposure to facilitate the promotion of superb contemporary creations in this field.